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ret336

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 18, 2011
6
1
Option key not working at boot up. Mac Pro mid 2012 quad core intel xeon. key board works fine on iMac. reset SMC. reset Pram. erased hard drive and installed Sierra. was running Mojave. seems like it does not see key board soon enough. reboot and tap caps lock, cap light did not come on until late in boot up. Also when I boot on iMac and hold option key at chime, the screen turns a light color. Mac Pro stays dark.
 
Option key not working at boot up. Mac Pro mid 2012 quad core intel xeon. key board works fine on iMac. reset SMC. reset Pram. erased hard drive and installed Sierra. was running Mojave. seems like it does not see key board soon enough. reboot and tap caps lock, cap light did not come on until late in boot up. Also when I boot on iMac and hold option key at chime, the screen turns a light color. Mac Pro stays dark.

Check your boot drive if it's formatted to APFS volume? If it is in APFS format, then the boot priority will treat USB as secondary, which means it will be discovered somewhat last. So if you use "Option" key to select the boot manager, any USB devices will be seen and detected about 1 to 2 mins later depending in what order and sometimes it won't even be discovered. The fix would be to reformat the boot hard drive to Mac OS Journaled HFS+ and then re-install Sierra.
 
thanks for your reply. The drive I am working with now is formatted Mac OS ext. (journaled). I have tried it on apfs.
 
This is just a wild guess, but it sounds like you have your keyboard plugged into a 3rd party USB card instead of a native Mac USB port. Do yo have a USB 3.0+ card in the machine, or do you not have a GPU with an EFI for your Mac?

Support for native USB ports is built into the firmware.
 
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ret336

How about making a SIGNATURE in your Macrumors profile to tell us how your Mac Pro is set up ?

EG;
How can we know which GPU you are using ? Has that GPU been EFI flashed ?
The only AMD cards that can currently show EFI boot selection ( in Mojave ) - IF THEY HAVE BEEN FLASHED are : HD 7950 HD 7970 R9 280 R9 280X

What is your current Bootrom version ? etc . . ..

My SIG is at the bottom of this post.
 
Check your boot drive if it's formatted to APFS volume? If it is in APFS format, then the boot priority will treat USB as secondary, which means it will be discovered somewhat last. So if you use "Option" key to select the boot manager, any USB devices will be seen and detected about 1 to 2 mins later depending in what order and sometimes it won't even be discovered. The fix would be to reformat the boot hard drive to Mac OS Journaled HFS+ and then re-install Sierra.

Due to the way the BootROM works, nothing from the BootROM will display on a display that is connected to a Metal-based card. That includes the Apple logo and Startup Manager.

To boot from an external boot device, use the Startup Disk preference pane in macOS.
 
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Thanks, crjackson2134. yes I do have a usb 3.0 card and my keyboard is connected to a 3.0 hub. I have connected k.b direct to native usb 2.0 on computer. that too did not work. I have added a signature to show more info about computer. I don't know about EFI.
 
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Thanks Mikx, Signature added. As you can tell I am new at this. I am running Serra now, but can slip in a ssd with Mojave on it. How can I tell if this R9 card has been flashed?
 
How can I tell if this R9 card has been flashed?

If you have NEVER seen the bootpicker screen (aka: boot manager) on this machine as currently configured, no doubt you probably have a non-flashed card. This means you will never see bootpicker until you replace the card with one that has the mac efi, or flash this card yourself IF POSSIBLE. The R9 card is a replacement of the original, so without flashing, it will have no bootpicker available.
 
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Thanks Jordan xp. I installed a metal base card in order to install Mojave. I have used the startup disk in system pref. I thought is was strange I could reset PRAM (command + option + P + r) but could not use option alone>
[doublepost=1566072338][/doublepost]Thanks crjackson2134. what would be a good card with Mac efi and use with Mojave?
 
If you intend to stay with Sierra or High Sierra for the foreseeable future, then you can run 2 different GPUs. You can get a stock Mac Nvidia GT120 which is dirt cheap, plentiful and needing no external power other than the PCIe slot as your boot screen GPU and your R9xxx as your main GPU card if you prefer not to flash the boot EFI rom on your R9xxx. You can either have 2 monitors hooked up or like me, have 1 monitor with 2 inputs and switch between inputs. Starting with bootrom 144.0.0.0.0, I am getting consistent intermittent blank screen with my RX580 which never did before the firmware upgrade from MP5,1 after completing boot up and I had to switch between GT120 and then back to RX580 to get the log in screen. Sometimes it's fine without switching and the log-in shows up with the RX580, but sometimes it's not. It's really annoying, but it could be something you are experiencing. That is probably why you may have a log-in screen but it's not showing on your monitor. Which is why it's possible Option key is not working because it's already on log-in. You need an EFI boot GPU capable card to really find out what's going on with your Mac Pro.
 
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